Topic: PC Gaming

Yeah, I'll get them eventually....

Best part of Spiderman on PC is Steamdeck makes it portable. Not the ideal portable experience obviously (bulky with low battery life) but it's still better than nothing.

Idk why but I could never get into Spiderman, despite being obsessed as a kid. Every time I play I lose interest after a couple hours. It's extremely well made, maybe it's just the whole "being locked to a single screen" thing. Or maybe it's just that it follows the same template as so many other games, it doesn't feel as interesting. It's basically Batman Arkham but swinging around the city instead of gliding and grappling.

I'll definitely buy on Steam though, if nothing else to show support and encourage more PC ports.

Despite having a dozen or so games sitting unplayed in my Steam library, I went ahead & bought LEGO Star Wars: the Skywalker Saga (though most of the games I have are JRPGs of some sort, & I don't want to get started on one only to be burnt out by the time XC3 launches).

Pretty hyped about Spiderman, definitely one to add to the list. I probably need to find the time to actually sit down and play some games though before I spend more money on games I'll never play. On PC I seem to always end up getting games and then just.... not playing them.....

Pretty much always just something quick on the Switch, Cities Skylines or some other random strategy game at my desk/on my laptop or Disney/Netflix/Youtube. Having a PC hooked upto my TV permanently has certainly helped but not quite as much as I thought

.... but I'm pretty sure I could get into Spiderman... surely....

In before Bayonetta 3 comes out the week before

i also have such a setup. so damn nice. i can sit at the desk or lay on my bed to use my PC. got an all-in-one media keyboard. only flaw is that the tv has no adaptive sync and it is an old plasma so the visual experience is far inferior to my 144hz monitor. but i genuinly play on my bed now most of the time except for some specific games.
one of the many advantages of PC gaming is that you can also have a console-like experience quite easily

So I've decided to do something about the storage situation amongst my PCs. I seem to have somehow got to the point where I seem to be doing the thing I tell people not to do. Stuff stored on portable storage devices rather than doing it properly. The PC I had hooked upto the TV? Its game library was running off a cheap portable Sandisk "portable SSD". Which.... I tested and was slower than a 2.5" HDD in sequential reads..... like 300Mbps (yes, b not B)

So I went down to the PC shop today and picked up a 2TB SATA SSD for what is effectively my "main gaming PC". Moved all the files around and after playing a little bit of a game noticed something. I'm not getting random stutters in the framerate anymore. Also, 2TB? Even with the size of some games these days that's a fair chunk of storage. I currently have a 1TB mechanical HDD in my main PC (not the HTPC), I suspect that'll be the last HDD I have in a PC

Obviously with the exception being network storage. I currently have a NAS with 6TB of usable storage (4x 2TB drives) which is getting pretty full. My intention is to replace it with an old PC running TrueNas. I have a i5-4590 with 16GB DDR3 which should do the job. Then drop a couple of 8TB HDDs in there. Storage problem solved with room for expansion. Want more storage? throw in another 8TB drive. Wand some GPU power for video encode? Throw in a GPU. Networking? There's space for 2.5Gbps cards, or 10Gbps if I don't want a GPU

I could also have some fun playing around with a Steam Caching server. Although the value of that might be pretty limited given I am not 100s of people at a LAN and I don't tend to download the same game more than once. Could be a fun project but

Heh, I invested in a 3TB SSD when I got my PC, @skywake .... It's definitely worth it over HDDs What's network storage for, work? Just don't think I use any of that, so I'm curious

@skywake SSD (especially NVME) are the biggest improvement in gaming since multicore CPUs. games dont just load faster, they even run smoother as there is so much streaming going on with gameworlds these days.

Once I got an SSD I never went back. I have 3 M.2s with two being NVMe's and two 2.5" SSDs in my desktop and three M.2s in my gaming laptop (one being NVMe). With prices plummeting year after year platter drive will only be used for commercial archiving and raw storage.

@6ch6ris6
Yeah, I've been a huge advocate of SSDs for years. I went as far as installing a 30GB ssd as a boot drive back when a 30GB ssd was a viable ssd size. Have had an SSD for boot in my main PC since probably around 2008

But I've always also had a HDD for mass storage. Usually an old spare laptop HDD from upgrading laptops to have an SSD. And I'd store the bulk of my steam library on that. But it's at the point now but where even that isn't really needed. You can comfortably be entirely SSD

The only reason I need, well "need", mechanical storage now is for Plex. An you don't need that much speed for even 4K video really

@skywake my current PC had a SSD boot drive (via SATA though) and a HDD for everything else. now i bought an m.2 NVME SSD für the games i currently play and i only use the HDD for games i dont play anymore, but might wanna come back to later. dont wanna download them so moving them from one storage device to the other via steam is very helpful. my next pc probably wont have any mechinical drives anymore

Playing The Quarry on PC. I am only a couple of hours in, but far enough in to say my emotions are very mixed. I guess this maybe sounds weird but I feel like I am almost too desperate to like this and it is holding me back from properly just enjoying it for what it is.

What I am trying to say is this is getting glowing reviews, I love these types of games and it is riffing on my favourite sort of horror so I thought I would just love this out of the gate. But right now I'm just... not loving this and so the whole time I am just focusing on why I don't love this, rather than just enjoying it. I dunno, it's weird. I am weird, I guess.

To try and explain why I am not loving it. There is some jank, I know that sorta comes as part of the package with these types of games and there is some clear mechanical refinement from previous titles, but I still far prefer sequences with QTEs than trying to awkwardly wrangle with the controls.

The game seems to run pretty ***** on my PC, too. Given it is a game of such high fidelity, it is difficult to know if it's just poorly optimised or my PC is just struggling to run it. But that might play a part, too. Especially when the game transitions to a new scene, it seems to almost breakdown entirely and that really pulls me out of it. Especially if the game locks up, which it has done a few times, requiring a force close.

But I do think there are other issues which are more baked into the actual design of the game. The environments, for example, are large and beautiful. This would be a positive, but they don't seem to add any extra points of interactivity to justify these larger environments and since characters always feel weird to control in these sorts of games, having more space to awkwardly bumble around isn't that fun for me.

Then there is the sort of core part of the game... choice. In past titles, there was always an immediate and then a longer term ramification for a choice. You were shaping the psychological profiles of characters and their dynamics with other characters in the short term depending on the choices you made, and then down the road this will culminate in a zig or zag. That may be happening behind the scenes here, but this isn't being relayed to the player. I guess in some senses this is a positive as it makes it less gamey, but I feel like it takes away some of the weight or excitement from a choice, as you don't have that immediate feedback from it. Like I say, it might still have huge pay off later on, but I'd like to see the cause and effect of my choices shaping things.

Also, the game looks almost so good it is a detriment, because sometimes the facial animation can be a bit weird and honestly, some of the animation in general is a bit weird. There is a scene where someone smears something on their face and it is like a prop hand on a string out of frame is wiping across the characters face or there is a scene where two characters are kissing and it looks like some weird unofficial mod for how strangely animated it is. In other games these wouldn't probably even hit the radar, but they pull me right out of the experience here, given how good it is uncanny valley territory the rest of the game looks.

Also the characters, too. They try to play to archetypes, modernise some of them and subvert others, it is all perfectly serviceable but I feel like they needed to do a bit more than just a bunch of stock characters, since we are spending way more time with them than just a 90 minute movie and are supposed to be fighting for their survival. However, I am happy to eat crow on this if further down the line when the ***** hits the fan I really bond with them. However, right now, everyone seems like different shades of emotionally stunted ***** and had this just been a conventional camp slasher, I would already be rooting for them all to die.

Haven't had much time to play that yet, @Pizzamorg .... I get what you're saying about the graphics, at least, though
I'll see about the rest tomorrow morning, now, though

Spoilers ahead for the Quarry so be warned (I am going to dip in and out of spoilers, so cba with trying to format all the tags, so just putting the warning up top).

I am up to Chapter 6 of The Quarry, probably just over five hours into my playthrough, and the game has really turned around for me. I do think the beginning takes far too long, the characters just aren't interesting enough to justify it. And I am sorta torn, because I kinda woulda like a pure 80s slasher done in the Supermassive style, but instead I guess this is more of a werewolf story? Unexpected, but werewolves and 80s summer camp slashers are like two of my favourite horror things, so I guess this was made for me!

I also thought I was doing quite well, but I am up to Chapter 6 and the culmination of all of my failure seems to be really stacking up!

Emma is wandering around alone and wet, and she may end up being my final girl, as she has survived multiple encounters with the monsters and my more obvious final girl is now dead.

One guy has turned into a monster and decapitated another character (the one I was so sure was gonna be the final girl) so that is one that is at least fully unsaveable. I have no idea if I can reverse the monsterfication of the other guy, so I may already be two down.

There is at least one another guy who got infected, we cut off his hand with an awesome Evil Dead referenced Groovy chainsaw, but I have no clue if this actually helped or will end up killing him anyway.

I also have another guy who might be dead after getting caught in a trap, too. I still don't know if the Hunters are actually the good guys, and how the weird ghost thing or the Hackett family, fit into all of this, so maybe this guy getting captured will guarantee his safety. But this is Supermassive, so probably not.

So yeah... this ain't going so well. Haha!

Oh, wow, you're way ahead of me, @Pizzamorg .... Because of all the demos available, I'm playing those, though I did finish chapter 1 & I don't think anyone is dead yet but I haven't looked into it all & will just see how it goes for now

Data hoarding basically. I have a NAS currently which has a tad under 5TB of movies. Maybe a few hundred GB other files, photos, music etc. Pretty much all of it is ripped from either my collection of DVDs/BluRays/UHD BluRays or family member collections. The DVDs don't take up much space at all, the BluRays are compressed a bit so take up 5-20GB each. The UHD discs are straight rips and are ~100GB each

It's setup with Plex so I can stream them from anywhere, bandwidth permitting. Although I don't have enough UL to stream the UHD movies anywhere but at home

tl;dr. It's basically like having a large HDD plugged into every device in your home that, if you want, anyone on your network can access

Cool, thanks, @skywake .... That's a lot of films! You been trying any of the demos up for the Summer of Gaming shows?

I am up to Chapter 9 of The Quarry now, so spoilers ahead:

I ended up getting another playable character killed. I ***** up a door puzzle and then after some cause and effect, chain of event, stuff later he ended up getting eaten. He kinda set everything in motion though, so I guess this is karma? It is a shame, as I actually found him quite likeable and I dunno if it's just because of the choices I made, but given he acts as sorta like the starting gun for everything, it sorta feels like he falls out of the main story very early on.

Same with Emma too, I dunno if it is because of my choices, but although she has had a few badass scenes, she is sorta floating in her own side story and seems to disappear from the game for hours at a time. Even when there are opportunities for her to seemingly join a more central narrative, the game doesn't let me.

I sorta thought she'd end up being my Final Girl because of all the encounters she survived, but they reintroduce Laura who is more like your typical Final Girl and Emma has sorta fallen out of the story entirely now.

I think overall though, given I am playing this blind and don't have the deluxe version with the free rewind, I think for a first playthrough I am doing relatively okay:

• I have two confirmed dead.
• I have got at least four infected (but at least one of them probably would have died had they not become infected). We do know now that there is a cure for the monsterfication, but I still don't know whether it is actually true or whether we can actually pull it off.
• That guy with one hand is now wandering around a scrapyard in the dark with only Brenda Song with a shotgun for protection. I guess we will have to see how this plays out. I can think of worse things than being trapped with a soaking wet Brenda Song, but I don't have a lot of faith in this guy living.

I have to big a backlog to bother with demos. If I want to try something new I just need to scroll down in my library a bit to find some game that I've never played and don't remember getting

So I finished my first play through of The Quarry, ended up ***** up right at the end, overthinking things and playing myself, so I ended up doing the final chapter twice. I know that kinda goes against the whole 'do it blind and accept whatever happens' first time around playthrough, but I was so close to the end, I just felt cheated.

Overall, I gotta be honest, I thought the game was fine but I am sorta confused by why people are going so mad for it. I do kinda wanna do another playthrough to mess around with the death rewind system, because reading some spoilers of some accounts of this, it seems like this system shows like how far back some of these choices go, with some decisions having payoffs hours later. I also think the director's chair movie mode is an interesting concept, setting up the characters how you want and then just hitting go and seeing where they end up.

However, from immersing myself in spoiler territory since doing my first run, it seems like a lot of the game is like locked in no matter what you do. And you could argue all of these games are smoke and mirrors in the end, but they made some really outlandish claims with this one (like a thousand different branches and 130 endings or something?!) and given this is getting mostly rave reviews with no one really calling this out, I wondered if maybe some mad lad had truly done the whole "divergent story" game we have been promised since games first began.

But no, it seems like a lot of the stuff that I thought was just the result of my choices, is just how the game has to play out. You might get to events in slightly different ways, but our stories are going to be almost identical no matter what choices we both made. I think the only way to get truly unique scenes is to get characters killed, but even then, the overall story will still be basically identical.

I think another thing that really hurts the replayability of The Quarry is there isn't the elasticity you are probably expecting. What I mean by this, is if you don't get characters to certain points in the story, it seems like you just don't get that story beat whatsoever. One of the biggest things I was looking forwards to seeing is how scenes will play out if X isn't alive to get to that sequence, however, the answer seems to be that the sequence just won't happen at all.

I was listening to Greg Miller's recount of his playthrough and because of who died in his playthrough, his game basically just ended at the conclusion of the second, it was basically missing the whole third act entirely which really brings quite a scatty story to somewhat of a complete whole. If that is what they mean by diverging paths, that you just lose content to give things a proper definitive ending then... that is bad, in my opinion.

I guess I won't truly know until I do my own playthrough, but right now I would say they are still very much chasing the shadow of Until Dawn, and I wouldn't say The Quarry is the huge leap from the Dark Pictures games in the way some are selling it as.